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AT-ATs Coming to a Forest Near You
Audent writes "Not strictly speaking anything any of us should classify as work related, or even open source, but holy shitbags! I want one of these.
Plustech, a subsidiary of tractor maker John Deere, has built a six-legged walking logging machine that just has to be the prototype for an AT-AT walker. Imagine parking this puppy at the mall!"
We must be careful with our Star Wars nomenclature. Both in tactical operation area (um, the woods), size, and appearance, this wood-cutting thingy most closely resembles an AT-ST, not an AT-AT. I think this may invalidate the numerous rebel grappling-hook jokes I see popping up. Unless that rope they used to trip 1 or 2 of the walkers in Return of the Jedi were grappling hooks....
That's exactly how insects move, the alternating tripod method. For something with 6 legs its the most efficient and stable way to move.
I cannot view the videos, since I run Linux...
Dude! Get MPlayer or Xine. There are others, but those two seem to be pretty well done.
Sorry about replying to myself but i found a relavent link about insect movement:
e nt.htm
http://www.ndsu.nodak.edu/entomology/topics/movem
Gaits: they're a tradeoff between efficiency (speed) and stability (not falling over). Insects seem to be the best example: starting with millipedes and centipedes, which move one set of legs at a time in a serial pattern over many legs...moving all the way up to cockroaches, which nearly always move with tripod gait, which allows them to skitter so quickly across floors and scare the living bejesus out of people.
Props to EECS 391: intro to artificial intelligence...
"I may be quite wrong." - Socrates
Look, in Tasmania the forestry industry is pretty fucked for lots of reasons. Yet "they" still come out with the same crap that you've just spouted. Chain logging may reduce the impact on the soil due to wheeled and tracked vehicles. However, it also means that the idiots can also log some of the steepest slopes, that is those that they would have never been able to log before. They (the logging companies) don't give a rats ass about the ecological implications of what they are doing, they are simply trying to subdue the public (and Government in many cases) long enough for them to screw us all over. I only feel a bit churned up over this because in Tasmania we have 400 year old 70+ metre tall Eucalyptus Regnums (the tallest hardwoods in the world) being sold for chips at just over AU$1000 a pop - it makes me sick
Actually arthropods cover spiders, centipedes, and insects. Arthropods is the phylum. Centipedes are class Chilopoda, spiders are class Arachnida and order Araneae, and insects are class Insecta.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
These walking machines are great for reducing damage while logging by reducing the need for road building and reducing the tracks they make on the ground.
All present walking machines share one big problem though, they are inefficient. This one needs a big diesel to generate constant hydraulic pressure, most of which is used just to keep it standing. Hardly any is left to propel the machine forward.
Animals typically use almost no energy to stand, and get most of their locomotion energy back through tendons etc.
Another problem is that bugs fall a lot. The six legged gait is not particularly stable at speed. Fast bugs switch from six to four leg gait when they speed up, and even two leg gait for sprints.
So this machine is stuck with the dead-slow one-at-a-time gait or the tippy six leg tripod gait, which is still pretty slow, and it has to have a big ass engine because of the inherent inefficiency.
I guess JD figures all of the above are worth it to silence the whining Greenies who cry over every tree. I'd say this year's fires are a pretty good argument in that direction. I expect to see a bunch of these things running up and down in the next few years, thinning the over grown bush.
Hope this works out for JD, as in a few years these things will hit the used equipment market. Then we can hot rod 'em!
I note this was developed in Finland. I suspect logging machines with a low impact on the forest environment are more popular in Scandinavia and Europe in general where there is a greater belief in sustainable forest practices than in the US or Canada. Also if these machines are fairly effcient at logging compared to traditional thinning or clearcutting practices I can see them being used in the US, after all many of the machines used in logging are already quite expensive, heck in some places they log with helicopters!
Happy Fun Ball is for external use only.
this machine helps in two ways. Cause it is more manouvrable it can walk around trees and take only a select few of the trees, say 1/3 of the trees leaving the others standing. Also very important is that it don't cut up the ground, apparently from a program I saw on the first protype its foot print is about the same weight as a human/deer. So when it puts its foot on a sapling the sapling will bounce right back.
All in all this machine would allow logging companies to use machines and yet be selective. If it works, prototype was years ago and it still is in testing, it could make a real difference. Of course the noise is very high, but the same a regular forest machines.